To understand the photometric and spectral data being, and soon to be,
obtained concerning exoplanet atmospheres and their character a variety of
theoretical tools and techniques need to be developed. These include, but
are not limited to, planetary atmospheres codes, thermochemical databases
for equilibrium and non-equilibrium composition studies, evolutionary and
structural modeling capabilities, and multi-dimensional circulation
models. I will review primary and secondary transit theories,
wide-separation giant planet evolution in the context of high-contrast
imaging, and super-Earth and mini-Neptune evolution in an effort to find a
unifying theme and approach to the exploration of not only the exoplanets
investigated to date, but also those to be discovered.

The Longitudinal Study of Astronomy Graduate Students (LSAGS), a joint project
of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and the American Institute of Physics (AIP),
emerged from the Women in Astronomy II conference held in Pasadena, CA, USA in 2003.
At the conference, concern about possible differential attrition for women arose from
the relatively high percentage of female junior (student) AAS members compared to the
lower representation of women among astronomy faculty members.

The Committee for the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) and the AAS Council
concluded that a longitudinal study was needed to collect data about which
variables affect career choices in astronomy and to determine whether any of these
variables exert a disproportionate force on either sex. In 2007-08, the project team,
under the direction of Rachel Ivie, Director of AIP’s Statistical Research Center (SRC),
asked all graduate students in astronomy and astrophysics in the US (~1500) to complete
the first survey. The LSAGS follows this same group of students as they leave graduate
school and enter their careers. In 2012-13, more than 800 responded to the second survey,
and most had completed PhDs. We plan a third round of data collection in 2015.

Results from the study show that there are statistically significant differences between
women and men in dissertation research methods, PhD subfield, and ratings of graduate school
advisors. We found that after graduate school, women were more likely than men to take a break
from work of six months or longer and to have made accommodations for a partner’s career
opportunities (the “two-body problem”). In turn, women were more likely to work outside the field
of astronomy because they were more likely to have experienced the “two-body problem.” In addition,
we found women were more likely than men to have experienced harassment or discrimination at school
or work. Finally, even while controlling for employment sector and years since PhD, we found that on
average, women have lower salaries than men. These findings have implications for programs seeking to
increase the representation of women in astronomy and physics. Funded by National Science Foundation AST-1347723.

The energy released from accretion on to a supermassive black hole has significant
implications for the evolution of its host galaxy. Much of this energy is released in
the form of radiative feedback that is concentrated within a few tens of gravitational
radii from the central black hole. Therefore studying the inner accretion flow—at the
intersection of infall and outflow—is essential for understanding how the feedback mechanism
works and the effect it will have on the surrounding environment.

The aim of my research is to understand these extreme, relativistic environments through
observations of X-ray reverberation mapping. Similar to Optical reverberation mapping,
where time delays of days or weeks between the continuum and the emission lines from
scattered light in Broad Line Region clouds map out kiloparsec scales, X-ray reverberation
reveals time delays of tens of seconds, which map out submicroparsec scales in the accretion
flow—well beyond the spatial resolution power of any instrument. This technique has just been
discovered in the past 6 years, so in this talk I will give an overview of how the measurements
are taken, and the discoveries and advancements in this quickly developing field. I will show
how reverberation is breaking degeneracies in our physical models and how it is helping us understand
the geometry and kinematics of the inner accretion flow with unprecedented sensitivity.

In this presentation, Dr. O'Meara shares the results of several studies on conditions
within academic departments, and the nature of advising relationships that matter to
graduate student agency and success. She also shares conditions that constrain graduate
student agency in career advancement, and are especially important for supporting women
and under-represented minority graduate students.

The Kepler mission has revealed that most stars host at least one
planet. We also know that almost half of stellar systems in the solar
neighborhood belong to multiple-star systems. Thus, binarity must be
considered if we are to characterize and understand as an ensemble the
known exoplanets and exoplanet candidates. First, I will discuss why
companions to exoplanet host stars can be a â€śbaneâ€ť to exoplanet
astronomers. Kepler transiting planet candidates rely on spectroscopic
and imaging follow-up observations to rule out false positives and detect
blended stars; such observations can change measured planet radii, and even
rule out planetary status. Traditionally the two techniques have probed
different host star companion parameters spaces, but how well, and under
what conditions, do the planet host companion parameters derived from the
two techniques agree? A new study by my colleagues and I tries to address
whether we really need both types of observations to validate Kepler planets.
Second, I will explain why companions to exoplanet host stars can be a "boon"
to exoplanet astronomers. While initially suggested as a sign of accretion of
H-depleted material onto the star, the giant planet-metallicity correlation is
now established as a mostly primordial effect -- stellar composition affects
planet formation. But is it still possible that planet formation may also alter
host star composition? Previous studies hinted at a few cases of compositional
differences between stars in binary systems, and now high-precision abundance
analyses are exploring this possibility in systems known to host planets. I will
discuss the important role binary host stars have to play in extending correlations
between stellar composition and the presence/type of planets that form, including
brand new (not yet published!) results.

Massive black holes, weighing millions to billions of solar masses,
inhabit the centers of today's galaxies. The progenitors of these
black holes powered luminous quasars within the first billion years of
the Universe. The first massive black holes must therefore have formed
around the time the first stars and galaxies appeared, and then
evolved along with their hosts for the past thirteen billion years. I
will discuss some aspects of the cosmic evolution of massive black
holes, from their formation to their growth and the interplay between
black holes and galaxies.

The Rosetta mission has returned more data from comet
Churyumov-Gerasimenko than we have ever had before about
a single comet. These data have spawned a very large number
of papers, many of them still available only on-line and others
not yet publicly available. A comparable volume of data is still
to come. With the myriad of results to sort through, it takes
time to sort out what we have really learned about comets in general
and their role in understanding the early solar system. This will
be a very preliminary attempt to highlight some interesting things
about C-G and to sort out the big picture

Planetary nebulae (PNe) provide textbook examples of astrophysical
plasma and shock processes and provide essential constraints for
theories of stellar evolution and the chemical enrichment of the
universe. The varied shapes of PNe reveal the actions of interacting
stellar winds from the late stages in the life of intermediate-mass
stars, and growing evidence suggests that many PNe are the products of
interacting binary star systems. As a result, studies of PNe can yield
insight into other astrophysical objects governed by binary processes,
such as, low mass X-ray binaries and Type Ia supernovae. Best known
for their ten thousand degree optical line emission, the Chandra X-ray
Observatory has established that a fraction of PNe display extended
X-ray emission from shock-heated plasmas of a few million degrees and
that the central stars harbor hotter than expected point-like emission
from plasmas that reach tens of millions of degrees. I describe the
discoveries, insights, and questions raised by Chandra observations of
PNe with emphasis on those results gleaned from the Chandra Planetary
Nebulae Survey (ChanPlaNS), which is the first systematic X-ray survey
of PNe in the solar neighborhood.

Flares are thought to result from the reconnection and relaxation of magnetic
fields in the upper layers (coronae) of stellar atmospheres. The highly dynamic
atmospheric response produces radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from
the radio to X-rays, on a range of timescales, from seconds to days. In this talk,
I will focus on the observed continuum and emission line characteristics of flares
in M dwarf stars in the optical and near-ultraviolet wavelength regimes. The hydrogen
line and continua emission at these wavelengths contain a large fraction of the radiated
energy during flares and critically constrain the heating mechanism(s) in the lower,
dense stellar atmosphere (the chromosphere and photosphere). I will discuss new
radiative-hydrodynamic flare models that reproduce the observed spectral properties
around the Balmer jump and in the optical wavelength regime. I will also compare to
new models of solar flares motivated by recent far- and near-ultraviolet spectroscopic
observations from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS).

For nearly two decades the Hubble Space Telescope has been heavily
used to locate supernovae in high redshift environments, with the
primary goal of improving constraints on the nature of dark energy.
Along the way we have made surprising observations on the nature of
supernovae themselves, and clues to their elusive progenitor mechanisms,
some of which are difficult to reconcile with observations at much lower
redshift. From complete volumetric supernova rate histories, that for the
first time extend to z > 2, we find type Ia supernova delay-time distributions
are consistent with a power law of index -1, but with the fraction of prompt
(t_d < 500 Myr) much less than expected from various ground-based surveys.
Core collapse supernova rates trace the cosmic star formation rate history,
but require stellar progenitors more massive than has been seen in deep studies
of nearby events (M > 20 M_sol). I will also detail our current campaigns on
clusters of galaxies (RELICS and the Frontier Fields), where gravitational lens
magnification provides a real potential for locating the first, primordial supernovae,
while also providing useful constraints on the mass models of the foreground gravitational lenses.

As a result of the high precision and cadence of surveys like MOST, CoRoT, and Kepler, we may now
directly observe the very low-level light variations arising from stellar granulation in cool stars. Here,
we discuss how this enables us to more accurately determine the physical properties of Sun-like stars,
to understand the nature of surface convection and its connection to magnetic activity, and to better
determine the properties of planets around cool stars. Indeed, such sensitive photometric "flicker"
variations are now within reach for thousands of stars, and we estimate that upcoming missions like
TESS will enable such measurements for ~100 000 stars. We present recent results that tie “flicker” to
granulation and enable a simple measurement of stellar surface gravity with a precision of ~0.1 dex. We
use this, together and solely with two other simple ways of characterizing the stellar photometric
variations in a high quality light curve, to construct an evolutionary diagram for Sun-like stars from the
Main Sequence on towards the red giant branch. We discuss further work that correlates “flicker” with
stellar density, allowing the application of astrodensity profiling techniques used in exoplanet
characterization to many more stars. We also present results suggesting that the granulation of F stars
must be magnetically suppressed in order to fit observations. Finally, we show that we may
quantitatively predict a star's radial velocity jitter from its brightness variations, permitting the use of
discovery light curves to help prioritize follow-up observations of transiting exoplanets.

Date: Wednesday 02-Dec-2015 Speaker: Dr. Leslie Young (SWRI) Title: Pluto and its five moons as revealed by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft

From decades of observations, astronomers have known that Pluto is a
dynamic and motley world in the third, icy zone of our solar system,
with one large moon, Charon, and a puzzling collection of four smaller
moons. To study these, New Horizons flies remote sensing instruments
that operate at ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared, and radio
wavelengths, and three in-situ instruments to measure the dust and
plasma environment. A complex observing sequence was executed to
study the atmospheres, surface composition, and geology of these
bodies. Since the flyby of the Pluto system in July 2015, we know
Pluto and its moons are even more fascinating than anticipated.
Pluto's surface ranges from dark, cratered terrains to tall mountain
ranges to geologically young ice flows. Charon sports a completely
unexpected dark, reddish area near its north pole. Pluto's atmosphere
is hazy out to hundreds of km -- particularly astonishing since Pluto
itself is only about 1200 km in radius. I will discuss these and
other revelations from the New Horizons spacecraft.

How might the process and measurement of star formation
in "dwarf" galaxies, similar in metallicity, mass, and size
to the Magellanic Clouds, be different when compared with
more commonly studied massive galaxies like the Milky Way?
Dwarf galaxies are metal-poor, typically have low gas and
stellar densities, and do not have bulges or spiral structure.
Thus, the dependence of star formation on gravitational stability,
density, pressure and metallicity can be studied.
I will review results based on the Local Volume Legacy (LVL) survey,
which has provided UV-IR imaging of a complete sample within 11 Mpc
of 258 galaxies of which >80% are dwarf galaxies,
and provide a preview of work from the HST Legacy ExtraGalactic
Ultraviolet Survey (LEGUS), which has recently obtained
complete five band imaging in NUV, U, B, V and I, for 50
a representative sample of nearby galaxies.